Book

Perillo, Lucia, 1958-2016.

Luck is luck : poems / Lucia Perillo.

1st ed.

New York : Random House, ©2005.

98 pages ; 22 cm

From the snowy egret to a woman's floating rib, nudism in America to Holy Communion, Simone de Beauvoir to Nathan's hot dogs-the subjects in Lucia Perillo's fourth collection of poetry lift off from surprising places and touch down on new ground. In "To My Big Nose," she muses: "hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature-a gryphon or sphinx-."

Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In "Languedoc," she writes, "Long ago / I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons, / but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument / that looks like a gourd with strings attached / (the problem is always the strings attached)."

Perillo's versions of nature are always unflinching: "Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, / a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. / The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree's black thorns / and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. / ... well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. / With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. / And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl."

Down-to-earth, full of playful twists of language, and woven from grand themes in an accessible, appealing way, these poems pierce the heart and delight the mind. Not one word is wasted.

Poetry.

Poetry.

Poet and former MacArthur fellow Lucia Perillo was born in 1958 and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. After earning a degree in wildlife management from McGill University in Montreal, she worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Perillo earned a master's degree in English from Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park, and taught at Syracuse, Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, and Southern Illinois University. Wilderness, nature-- and illness-- were frequent themes in her writings-- in 1988, while in her 30s, Perillo was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Perillo passed away in Olympia, Washinngton on October 16, 2016. Perillo's poetry has been described as vibrant, lyric and full of interesting paradoxes: elegant adjectives paired with visceral images, and violence tempered by the possibilities of human compassion and language. Perillo has published numerous books of poetry, the memoir "I've Heard the Vultures Singing : Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature," and a book of short stories. Her last work, "Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones : Selected and New Poems," was published on Fenruary 9, 2016 by Copper Canyon Press. Her writing garnered multiple honors including a Pushcart Prize, the Kate Tufts Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Norma Farber Award, a Washington Book Award and the Bobbitt National Prize for poetry.

Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, 2006

To My Big Nose -- Languedoc -- Christmas at Forty -- Fizz Ed -- The Crows Start Demanding Royalties -- On the Destruction of the Mir -- Le Deuxieme Sexe -- The Lord's Prayer -- The Believer -- Hail Mary -- The Floating Rib -- Original Sin -- New Hat -- The Cardinal's Nephews -- Nathan's -- White Bird/Black Drop -- On the High Suicide Rate of Dentists -- Little Phallus Song (for John Berryman) -- Nudism in America -- Life in the Year 2000 -- Poem Without Breasts -- Given Unlimited Space, the Dead Expand Limitlessly -- Fresh Water and Salt -- In the Confessional Mode, with a Borrowed Movie Trope -- Fubar -- For the Pileated Woodpecker and Its Cousin, the Ivory-billed, Who May or May Not Be Extinct -- Bulletin from Somewhere up the Creek -- Second Poem Without Breasts -- News from the Republic of Housecoats -- On the Rhythmic Nature of Obscure Toil -- Urban Legend -- By Edvard Munch, Two Paintings Thirty Years Apart on the Same Jetty -- A Simple Camp Song -- Valentine Delivered by a Horde of Birds, Some Years After Its Original Inception -- Book of Bob -- My Eulogy Was Deemed Too Strange -- Conscription Papers -- The Afterlife of the Fifties Dads -- For the First Clone, Aging Now and Largely Forgotten -- Night Festival, Olympia -- Eulogy from the Boardwalk Behind the KFC -- As Per the Geese -- Salmon Song -- Beauty Bark -- Shrike Tree -- Chum -- Tapas.

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Contributor biographical information

Publisher description

New York Times obituary for Perillo

2004051084

140006323X

9781400063239

140006323X

55960880

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